16 comments

Ditch wind & solar. Keep coal, gas , & nuclear. Just north of where \i sit the \polar Bears are thriving. & the sea ice is thickening.The ice is growing in Antarctica. Anthropogenic Global Warming s not happening.What CO2 we do produce is easily absorbed by the flora ' Having a molecular density 3 times that of air it does not rise to cause a greenhouse effect.
Even the weather office says there has been no warming for 16 years. Why screw around with stuff that does not work

Exactly snafu, but I have no doubt what so ever that your scientific and engeering based argument will fall on deaf ears in the face of ....blah blah blah what we need is wind turbines!
and unfortunately because being 'green' is cool and very few in the government have any relavent qualifications, skills or experience we will continue to spend hundreds of millions on the wrong technologies.
One thing you said about small scale domestic installations is something I have said for some time (not that anyone who counts has heard!) Make ALL new developments have roofs made from solar PV (all new domestic houses and all commercial buildings), make these a mandatory planning requirement. They would attract NO subsidies, but you would use the power generated in the day with excess to the grid and claim back and equal amount for free at night.
This would equate (eventually) to hundreds of thousands of acres of PV to support the base load and drive down the cost of PV panels (assuming you are OK for the chinese to polute the plannet in their manufacture!)

Dear Mr. GuestPost,
You have evidently missed a key point in your well-constructed, authoritative (sic) argument; when the wind fails to blow greater than 5m/s at night your iron lung stops working along with all else.
Renewables cannot possibly support the baseload reliably let alone the peak demand. Renewables are a useful tool for supplementing average annual baseload infrastructure but cannot supplant it reliably on daily operations. To adequately support peak demand and windless/overcast periods the grid requires relatively instant on/off power generation, for which the choice is: hydro, gas, nuclear. Coal takes several hours preparation to a forecasted demand pattern thus is not capable of sufficiently rapid response to the peak demand.
Power generation from hydro will require barriers on the Rivers Severn, Mersey, Humber but will still only meet 20% of daily demand. Construction costs will dwarf the costs of the Channel Tunnel and the maintenance and de-silting budget will render the whole project unviable.
Germany has realised that there is little alternative to coal-fired generation having scrapped their nuclear option as a result of ill-informed Green pressure groups who ,incidentally, also bizarrely oppose coal, oil and gas. Therefore the EU directive and policy is in tatters. We must temporarily disregard it in the same manner as all of the other countries in the EU that will fail to achieve the wildly unrealistic targets.
The UK needs to take stock of the situation and continue to use coal for baseload, gas/nuclear/hydro for peak. Renewable generation capacity should be small scale domestic generation; 20 million small scale domestic installations can make a significant dent in the demand cycle and reduce the peak demand. The UK is not ready to make large scale changes to its generation capacity without significant risk.
Yes, I am a smarta*se and I do hold a BSc in the subject. Have a gay (British connotation, not American) day.

What idiot signed the UK up to impossible targets for carbon emissions while the rest of the world carried on in the same way . That would be "The mouth of the Humber" Hulls own windbag, he could create enough wind to drive a turbine

Interesting topic. Nuclear is now being sold by politicians as 'low carbon, renewable energy'. In other words we are being asked to believe it is the same as wind and wave power. In order to meet international carbon targets the UK must get rid of coal and gas power stations. But it can't. Wind or whatever renewable is not 7/24. Therefore coal and gas power stations must be kept on stand-by to bring on stream when needed. Once the European Fast Reactor plants come on stream (as they are intended) these become 7/24 too. But they are also said to be low carbon and renewable. So the conclusion then is we shall no longer have need for wind or wave once nuclear is up and running. The point of all this? Where do we reprocess spent nuclear fuel? The government has said Sellafield is to close for this task by 2015. So where is the re-processing to be done? Try Killingholme and ask what it is Able UK are doing on their site.

Nuclear power plants take a decade to build; they pollute the environment with cancer-causing radiation; they create nuclear waste YOU and YOUR ancestors will have to pay for for 200,000 years, and nuclear energy is unreliable and expensive.
A wind turbine can be installed in ONE day and be operational in 2 weeks. Wind energy doesn't create dangerous pollution or increase leukemia rates in children living near them like nuclear power plants do.
Last year, the U.S. used more Renewable Energy than nuclear energy, utilizing Renewable Energy sources such as biomass/biofuels, hydropower, wind and solar.
Germany has only opened ONE new coal plant and is investing and using Renewable Energy so successfuly that they EXPORT energy to France.
Nuclear energy is not worth the risks and huge expense.
Renewable Energy is a win-win for everyone and their generations down the line.